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Ignition!
FIGURE 1 Engraving on plastic by Inga Pratt Clark, presented to Bob Border, Engineering
Officer, NARTS, by the Propellant Division, 1959
FIGURE 2 This is what a test firing should look like. Note the mach diamonds in the exhaust
stream. U.S. Navy photo
FIGURE 3 And this is what it may look like if something goes wrong. The same test cell, or its
remains, is shown. U.S. Navy photo
Ignition!

An Informal History of
Liquid Rocket Propellants

BY JOHN D. CLARK

Those who cannot remember the past are

condemned to repeat it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Clark, John D. ( John Drury), 1907–1988, author.

Title: Ignition! : an informal history of liquid rocket propellants /
by John D. Clark.
Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2017] | Orignally pub-
lished: New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 1972. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017033845| ISBN 9780813507255 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780813595832 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Liquid propellants. | Liquid propellants—History. | Rockets
(Aeronautics)—Fuel—History.
Classification: LCC TL785 .C53 2017 | DDC 629.47/522—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033845

Copyright © 2017 by Rutgers, the State University

All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permis-
sion from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New
Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S.
copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48–1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to my wife Inga, who heckled me into writing it
with such wifely remarks as, “You talk a hell of a fine history. Now set
yourself down in front of the typewriter—and write the damned thing!”
Contents

In Re John D. Clark xi
Preface xiii
1 How It Started 1
2 Peenemunde and JPL 9
3 The Hunting of the Hypergol . . . 20
4 . . . and Its Mate 41
5 Peroxide—Always a Bridesmaid 59
6 Halogens and Politics and Deep Space 65
7 Performance 82
8 Lox and Flox and Cryogenics in General 94
9 What Ivan Was Doing 105
10 “Exotics” 110
11 The Hopeful Monoprops 120
12 High Density and the Higher Foolishness 159
13 What Happens Next 173
Glossary 177
Index 181

ix
In Re John D. Clark
BY ISAAC ASIMOV

I first met John in 1942 when I came to Philadelphia to live. Oh, I had known
of him before. Back in 1937, he had published a pair of science fiction shorts,
“Minus Planet” and “Space Blister,” which had hit me right between the eyes.
The first one, in particular, was the earliest science fiction story I know of
which dealt with “anti-matter” in realistic fashion.
Apparently, John was satisfied with that pair and didn’t write any more s.f.,
kindly leaving room for lesser lights like myself.
In 1942, therefore, when I met him, I was ready to be awed. John, however,
was not ready to awe. He was exactly what he has always been, completely
friendly, completely self-unconscious, completely himself.
He was my friend when I needed friendship badly. America had just entered
the war and I had come to Philadelphia to work for the Navy as a chemist. It
was my first time away from home, ever, and I was barely twenty-two. I was
utterly alone and his door was always open to me. I was frightened and he con-
soled me. I was sad and he cheered me.
For all his kindness, however, he could not always resist the impulse to take
advantage of a greenhorn.
Every wall of his apartment was lined with books, floor to ceiling, and he
loved displaying them to me. He explained that one wall was devoted to fic-
tion, one to histories, one to books on military affairs and so on.
“Here,” he said, “is the Bible.” Then, with a solemn look on his face, he
added, “I have it in the fiction section, you’ll notice, under J.”
“Why J?” I asked.
And John, delighted at the straight line, said, “J for Jehovah!”

xi
xii • In Re John D. Clark

But the years passed and our paths separated. The war ended and I returned
to Columbia to go after my PhD (which John had already earned by the time I
first met him) while he went into the happy business of designing rocket fuels.
Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad.
I don’t mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-
shattering exponent of far-out insanity.
There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that
flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and
some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels
have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.
Well, John Clark worked with these miserable concoctions and survived all
in one piece. What’s more he ran a laboratory for seventeen years that played
footsie with these liquids from Hell and never had a time-lost accident.
My own theory is that he made a deal with the Almighty. In return for
Divine protection, John agreed to take the Bible out of the fiction section.
So read this book. You’ll find out plenty about John and all the other sky-
high crackpots who were in the field with him and you may even get (as I did)
a glimpse of the heroic excitement that seemed to make it reasonable to cuddle
with death every waking moment—to say nothing of learning a heck of a lot
about the way in which the business of science is really conducted.
It is a story only John can tell so caustically well from the depths within.
Preface

Millions of words have been written about rocketry and space travel, and
almost as many about the history and development of the rocket. But if
anyone is curious about the parallel history and development of rocket
propellants—the fuels and the oxidizers that make them go–he will find that
there is no book which will tell him what he wants to know. There are a few
texts which describe the propellants currently in use, but nowhere can he learn
why these and not something else fuel Saturn V or Titan II, or SS-9. In this
book I have tried to make that information available, and to tell the story of
the development of liquid rocket propellants: the who, and when, and where
and how and why of their development. The story of solid propellants will
have to be told by somebody else.
This is, in many ways, an auspicious moment for such a book. Liquid
propellant research, active during the late 40’s, the 50’s, and the first half of
the 60’s, has tapered off to a trickle, and the time seems ripe for a summing
up, while the people who did the work are still around to answer questions.
Everyone whom I have asked for information has been more than cooperative,
practically climbing into my lap and licking my face. I have been given reams
of unofficial and quite priceless information, which would otherwise have per-
ished with the memories of the givers. As one of them wrote to me, “What an
opportunity to bring out repressed hostilities!” I agree.
My sources were many and various. Contractor and government agency
progress (sometimes!) reports, published collections of papers presented
at various meetings, the memories of participants in the story, intelligence
reports; all have contributed. Since this is not a formal history, but an
informal attempt by an active participant to tell the story as it happened, I
haven’t attempted formal documentation. Particularly as in many cases such

xiii
xiv • Preface

documentation would be embarrassing—not to say hazardous! It’s not only

newsmen who have to protect their sources.
And, of course, I have drawn on my own records and recollections. For
something more than twenty years, from 1 November 1949, when I joined the
U.S. Naval Air Rocket Test Station, until 2 January 1970, when I retired from
its successor, the Liquid Rocket Propulsion Laboratory of Picatinny Arsenal,
I was a member of the unofficial, but very real, liquid propellant community,
and was acutely aware of what was going on in the field, in this country and in
England. (It wasn’t until the late 50’s that it was possible to learn much about
the work in the Soviet Union, and propellant work outside these three coun-
tries has been negligible.)
The book is written not only for the interested layman—and for him I
have tried to make things as simple as possible—but also for the professional
engineer in the rocket business. For I have discovered that he is frequently
abysmally ignorant of the history of his own profession, and, unless forcibly
restrained, is almost certain to do something which, as we learned fifteen years
ago, is not only stupid but is likely to result in catastrophe. Santayana knew
exactly what he was talking about.
So I have described not only the brilliantly conceived programs of research
and development, but have given equal time to those which, to put it mildly,
were not so well advised. And I have told the stories of the triumphs of propel-
lant research; and I have described the numerous blind alleys up which, from
time to time, the propellant community unanimously charged, yapping as
they went.
This book is opinionated. I have not hesitated to give my own opinion of a
program, or of the intelligence—or lack of it—of the proposals made by vari-
ous individuals. I make no apology for this, and can assure the reader that such
criticism was not made with the advantage of 20–20 hindsight. At one point,
in writing this book, when I had subjected one particular person’s proposals
to some rather caustic criticism, I wondered whether or not I had felt that way
at the time they were made. Delving into my (very private) logbook, I found
that I had described them then, simply as “Brainstorms and bullbleep!” So my
opinion had not changed—at least, not noticeably.
I make no claim to completeness, but I have tried to give an accurate
account of the main lines of research. If anyone thinks that I have unreason-
ably neglected his work, or doesn’t remember things as I do, let him write to
me, and the matter will be set right in the next (d.v.) edition. And if I seem
to have placed undue emphasis on what happened in my own laboratory, it is
not because my laboratory was unusual (although more nutty things seem to
have happened there than in most labs) but that it was not, so that an account
of what happened there is a good sample of the sort of things which were hap-
pening, simultaneously, in a dozen other laboratories around the country.
 Preface • xv

The treatment of individuals’ names is, I know, inconsistent. The fact that
the family name of somebody mentioned in the text is preceded by his given
name rather than by his initials signifies only that I know him very well. Titles
and degrees are generally ignored. Advanced degrees were a dime a dozen in
the business. And the fact that an individual is identified in one chapter with
one organization, and with another in the next, should be no cause for confu-
sion. People in the business were always changing jobs. I think I set some sort
of a record by staying with the same organization for twenty years.
One thing that is worth mentioning here is that this book is about a very few
people. The propellant community—comprising those directing or engaged in
liquid propellant research and development—was never large. It included, at
the most, perhaps two hundred people, three-quarters of whom were serving
merely as hands, and doing what the other quarter told them to do. That one
quarter was a remarkably interesting and amusing group of people, including
a surprisingly small number (compared to most other groups of the same size)
of dopes or phoneys. We all knew each other, of course, which made for the
informal dissemination of information at a velocity approaching that of light.
I benefited particularly from this, since, as I was working for Uncle, and not
for a rival contractor, nobody hesitated to give me “proprietory” information.
If I wanted the straight dope from somebody, I knew I could get it at the bar
at the next propellant meeting. (Many of the big propellant meetings were
held in hotels, whose management, intelligently, would always set up a bar just
outside the meeting hall. If the meeting wasn’t in a hotel, I’d just look around
for the nearest cocktail lounge; my man would probably be there.) I would sit
down beside him, and, when my drink had arrived, ask, “Joe, what did happen
on that last test firing you made? Sure, I’ve read your report, but I’ve written
reports myself. What really happened?” Instant and accurate communication,
without pain.
Conformists were hard to find in the group. Almost to a man, they were
howling individualists. Sometimes they got along together—sometimes they
didn’t, and management had to take that into account. When Charlie Tait left
Wyandotte, and Lou Rapp left Reaction Motors, and they both came to Aero-
jet, the management of the latter, with surprising intelligence, stationed one of
them in Sacramento and one in Azusa, separated by most of the length of the
state of California. Lou had been in the habit, when Charlie was giving a paper
at a meeting, of slipping a nude or two into Charlie’s collection of slides, and
Charlie was no longer amused.
But friends or not, or feuding or not, everything we did was done with
one eye on the rest of the group. Not only were we all intellectual rivals—
“anything you can do I can do better”—but each of us knew that the others
were the only people around competent to judge his work. Management sel-
dom had the technical expertise, and since most of our work was classified, we
xvi • Preface

couldn’t publish it to the larger scientific community. So praise from the in-
group was valued accordingly. (When Irv Glassman, presenting a paper, men-
tioned “Clark’s classical work on explosive sensitivity,” it put me on cloud nine
for a week. Classical, yet!) The result was a sort of group Narcissism which was
probably undesirable—but it made us work like Hell.
We did that anyway. We were in a new and exciting field, possibilities were
unlimited, and the world was our oyster just waiting to be opened. We knew
that we didn’t have the answers to the problems in front of us, but we were sub-
limely confident of our ability to find them in a hurry, and set about the search
with a “gusto”—the only word for it—that I have never seen before or since. I
wouldn’t have missed the experience for the world. So, to my dear friends and
once deadly rivals, I say, “Gentlemen, I’m glad to have known you!”

John D. Clark
Newfoundland, N.J.
January 1971
Ignition!
 1
How It Started

The dear Queen had finally gone to her reward, and King Edward VII was
enjoying himself immensely as he reigned over the Empire upon which the sun
never set. Kaiser Wilhelm II in Germany was building battleships and mak-
ing indiscreet remarks, and in the United States President Theodore Roosevelt
was making indiscreet remarks and building battleships. The year was 1903,
and before its end the Wright brothers’ first airplane was to stagger briefly into
the air. And in his city of St. Petersburg, in the realm of the Czar of All the
Russias, a journal whose name can be translated as “Scientific Review” pub-
lished an article which attracted no attention whatsoever from anybody.
Its impressive but not very informative title was “Exploration of Space
with Reactive Devices,” and its author was one Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsi-
olkovsky, an obscure schoolteacher in the equally obscure town of Borovsk in
Kaluga Province.
The substance of the article can be summarized in five simple statements.

1 Space travel is possible.

2 This can be accomplished by means of, and only by means of, rocket
propulsion, since a rocket is the only known propulsive device which
will work in empty space.
3 Gunpowder rockets cannot be used, since gunpowder (or smokeless
powder either, for that matter) simply does not have enough energy to
do the job.
4 Certain liquids do possess the necessary energy.
5 Liquid hydrogen would be a good fuel and liquid oxygen a good oxi-
dizer, and the pair would make a nearly ideal propellant combination.

1
2 • Ignition!

The first four of these statements might have been expected to raise a
few eyebrows if anybody had been listening, but nobody was, and they were
received with a deafening silence. The fifth statement was of another sort
entirely, and a few years earlier would have been not merely surprising, but
utterly meaningless. For liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen were new things
in the world.
Starting with Michael Faraday in 1823, scientists all over Europe had been
trying to convert the various common gases to liquids—cooling them, com-
pressing them, and combining the two processes. Chlorine was the first to
succumb, followed by ammonia, carbon dioxide, and many others, and by the
seventies only a few recalcitrants still stubbornly resisted liquefaction. These
included oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen (fluorine had not yet been isolated
and the rare gases hadn’t even been discovered), and the holdouts were pes-
simistically called the “permanent gases.”
Until 1883. In April of that year, Z. F. Wroblewski, of the University of
Krakow, in Austrian Poland, announced to the French Academy that he and
his colleague K. S. Olszewski had succeeded in their efforts to liquefy oxy-
gen. Liquid nitrogen came a few days later, and liquid air within two years. By
1891 liquid oxygen was available in experimental quantities, and by 1895 Linde
had developed a practical, large-scale process for making liquid air, from which
liquid oxygen (and liquid nitrogen) could be obtained, simply by fractional
distillation.
James Dewar (later Sir James, and the inventor of the Dewar flask and
hence of the thermos bottle), of the Royal Institute in London, in 1897 lique-
fied fluorine, which had been isolated by Moisson only eleven years before,
and reported that the density of the liquid was 1.108. This wildly (and inex-
plicably) erroneous value (the actual density is 1.50) was duly embalmed in
the literature, and remained there, unquestioned, for almost sixty years, to the
confusion of practically everybody.
The last major holdout—hydrogen—finally succumbed to his efforts,
and was liquefied in May of 1898. And, as he triumphantly reported, “on the
thirteenth of June, 1901, five liters of it (liquid hydrogen) were successfully
conveyed through the streets of London from the laboratory of the Royal
Institution to the chambers of the Royal Society!”
And only then could Tsiolkovsky write of space travel in a rocket propelled
by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Without Wroblewski and Dewar, Tsi-
olkovsky would have had nothing to talk about.
In later articles, Tsiolkovsky discussed other possible rocket fuels—
methane, ethylene, benzene, methyl and ethyl alcohols, turpentine, gasoline,
kerosene—practically everything that would pour and burn, but he appar-
ently never considered any oxidizer other than liquid oxygen. And although
he wrote incessantly until the day of his death (1935) his rockets remained on
 How It Started • 3

paper. He never did anything about them. The man who did was Robert H.
Goddard.
As early as 1909 Dr. Goddard was thinking of liquid rockets, and came to
the same conclusions as had his Russian predecessor (of whom he had never
heard); that liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen would be a near-ideal com-
bination. In 1922, when he was Professor of Physics at Clark University, he
started actual experimental work on liquid rockets and their components. Liq-
uid hydrogen at that time was practically impossible to come by, so he worked
with gasoline and liquid oxygen, a combination which he used in all of his
subsequent experimental work. By November 1923 he had fired a rocket motor
on the test stand, and on March 16, 1926, he achieved the first flight of a liquid-
propelled rocket. It flew 184 feet in 2.5 seconds. (Exactly forty years later, to
the day, Armstrong and Scott were struggling desperately to bring the wildly
rolling Gemini 8 under control.)
One odd aspect of Goddard’s early work with gasoline and oxygen is the
very low oxidizer-to-fuel ratio that he employed. For every pound of gasoline
he burned, he burned about 1.3 or 1.4 pounds of oxygen, when three pounds
of oxygen would have been closer to the optimum. As a result, his motors
performed very poorly, and seldom achieved a specific impulse of more than
170 seconds. (The specific impulse is a measure of performance of a rocket and
its propellants. It is obtained by dividing the thrust of the rocket in pounds,
say, by the consumption of propellants in pounds per second. For instance, if
the thrust is 200 pounds and the propellant consumption is one pound per
second, the specific impulse is 200 seconds.) It seems probable that he worked
off-ratio to reduce the combustion temperature and prolong the life of his
hardware—that is, simply to keep his motor from burning up.
The impetus for the next generation of experimenters came in 1923, from
a book by a completely unknown Transylvanian German, one Herman
Oberth. The title was Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen, or The Rocket into
Planetary Space, and it became, surprisingly, something of a minor best seller.
People started thinking about rockets—practically nobody had heard of God-
dard, who worked in exaggerated and unnecessary secrecy—and some of the
people who thought about rockets decided to do something about them.
First, they organized societies. The Verein fur Raumschiffart, or Society for
Space Travel, generally known as the VfR, was the first, in June 1927. The
American Interplanetary Society was founded early in 1930, the British Inter-
planetary Society in 1933, and two Russian groups, one in Leningrad and
one in Moscow, in 1929. Then, they lectured and wrote books about rockets
and interplanetary travel. Probably the most important of these was Robert
Esnault-Pelterie’s immensely detailed L’Astronautique, in 1930. And Fritz Lang
made a movie about space travel—Frau in Mond, or The Woman on the Moon,
and hired Oberth as technical adviser. And it was agreed that Lang and the
4 • Ignition!

film company (UFA) would put up the money necessary for Oberth to design
and build a liquid-fueled rocket which would be fired, as a publicity stunt, on
the day of the premiere of the movie.
The adventures of Oberth with the movie industry—and vice versa—are
a notable contribution to the theater of the absurd (they have been described
elsewhere, in hilarious detail), but they led to one interesting, if abortive,
contribution to propellant technology. Foiled in his efforts to get a gasoline-
oxygen rocket flying in time for the premiere of the movie (the time available
was ridiculously short) Oberth designed a rocket which, he hoped, could
be developed in a hurry. It consisted of a long vertical aluminum tube with
several rods of carbon in the center, surrounded by liquid oxygen. The idea
was that the carbon rods were to burn down from the top at the same rate
as the oxygen was to be consumed, while the combustion gases were ejected
through a set of nozzles at the top (forward) end of the rocket. He was never
able to get it going, which was probably just as well, as it would infallibly have
exploded. But—it was the first recorded design of a hybrid rocket—one with
a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. (A “reverse” hybrid uses a solid oxidizer and a
liquid fuel.)
At any rate, the premiere came off on October 15, 1929 (without rocket
ascent), and the VfR (after paying a few bills) fell heir to Oberth’s equip-
ment, and could start work on their own in early 1930.
But here the story starts to get complicated. Unknown to the VfR—or to
anybody else—at least three other groups were hard at work. F. A. Tsander,
in Moscow, headed one of these. He was an aeronautical engineer who had
written extensively—and imaginatively—on rockets and space travel, and in
one of his publications had suggested that an astronaut might stretch his fuel
supply by imitating Phileas Fogg. When a fuel tank was emptied, the astronaut
could simply grind it up and add the powdered aluminum thus obtaining to
the remaining fuel, whose heating value would be correspondingly enhanced!
This updated emulation of the hero of Around the World in Eighty Days, who,
when he ran out of coal, burned up part of his ship in order to keep the rest
of it moving, not unnaturally remained on paper, and Tsander’s experimental
work was in a less imaginative vein. He started work in 1929, first with gasoline
and gaseous air, and then, in 1931, with gasoline and liquid oxygen.
Another group was in Italy, headed by Luigi Crocco, and financed, reluc-
tantly, by the Italian General Staff.*
Crocco started to work on liquid rockets in 1929, and by the early part
of 1930 was ready for test firings. His work is notable not only for the sur-
prising sophistication of his motor design, but above all for his propellants.

* The fact that the whole project was headed by a General G. A. Crocco is no coinci-
dence. He was Luigi’s father, and an Italian father is comparable to a Jewish mother.
 How It Started • 5

He used gasoline for his fuel, which is not surprising, but for his oxidizer he
broke away from oxygen, and used nitrogen tetroxide, N2O4. This was a big
step—nitrogen tetroxide, unlike oxygen, can be stored indefinitely at room
temperature—but nobody outside of his own small group heard of the work
for twenty-four years!*
V. P. Glushko, another aeronautical engineer, headed the rocket group in
Leningrad. He had suggested suspensions of powdered beryllium in oil or gas-
oline as fuels, but in his first firings in 1930, he used straight toluene. And he
took the same step—independently—as had Crocco. He used nitrogen tetrox-
ide for his oxidizer.
The VfR was completely unaware of all of this when they started work.
Oberth had originally wanted to use methane as fuel, but as it was hard to
come by in Berlin, their first work was with gasoline and oxygen. Johannes
Winkler, however, picked up the idea, and working independently of the VfR,
was able to fire a liquid oxygen-liquid methane motor before the end of 1930.
This work led nowhere in particular, since, as methane has a performance only
slightly superior to that of gasoline, and is much harder to handle, nobody
could see any point to following it up.
Much more important were the experiments of Friedrich Wilhelm Sander,
a pyrotechnician by trade (he made commercial gunpowder rockets) who
fired a motor early in March 1931. He was somewhat coy about his fuel, call-
ing it merely a “carbon carrier,” but Willy Ley has suggested that it may well
have been a light fuel oil, or benzene, into which had been stirred consider-
able quantities of powdered carbon or lampblack. As a pyrotechnician, Sander
would naturally think of carbon as the fuel, and one Hermann Noordung (the
pseudonym of Captain Potocnik of the old Imperial Austrian army), the year
before, had suggested a suspension of carbon in benzene as a fuel. (The idea

* In a letter to El Comercio, of Lima, Peru, 7 October, 1927, one Pedro A. Paulet, a

Peruyian chemical engineer, claimed to have experimented—in 1895–97 (!)—with
a rocket motor burning gasoline and nitrogen tetroxide. If this claim has any founda-
tion in fact, Paulet anticipated not only Goddard but even Tsiolkovsky.
However, consider these facts. Paulet claimed that his motor produced a thrust
of 200 pounds, and that it fired intermittently, 300 times a minute, instead of continu-
ously as conventional rocket motors do.
He also claimed that he did his experimental work in Paris.
Now, I know how much noise a 200-pound motor makes. And I know that if one
were fired three hundred times a minute—the rate at which a watch ticks—it would
sound like a whole battery of fully automatic 75 millimeter antiaircraft guns. Such a
racket would have convinced the Parisians that the Commune had returned to take its
vengeance on the Republic, and would certainly be remembered by somebody beside
Paulet! But only Paulet remembered.
In my book, Paulet’s claims are completely false, and his alleged firings never took
place.
6 • Ignition!

was to increase the density of the fuel, so that smaller tanks might be used.)
The important thing about Sander’s work is that he introduced another oxi-
dizer, red fuming nitric acid. (This is nitric acid containing considerable
quantities—5 to 20 or so percent—of dissolved nitrogen tetroxide.) His exper-
iments were the start of one of the main lines of propellant development.
Esnault-Pelterie, an aviation pioneer and aeronautical engineer, during 1931,
worked first with gasoline and oxygen, and then with benzene and nitrogen
tetroxide, being the third experimenter to come up, independently, with this
oxidizer. But that was to be a repeating pattern in propellant research—half a
dozen experimenters generally surface simultaneously with identical bones in
their teeth! His use of benzene (as Glushko’s of toluene) as a fuel is rather odd.
Neither of them is any improvement on gasoline as far as performance goes,
and they are both much more expensive. And then Esnault-Pelterie tried to
use tetranitromethane, C(NO2)4 for his oxidizer, and promptly blew off four
fingers. (This event was to prove typical of TNM work.)
Glushko in Leningrad took up where Sander had left off, and from 1932
to 1937 worked with nitric acid and kerosene, with great success. The com-
bination is still used in the USSR. And in 1937, in spite of Esnault-Pelterie’s
experience, which was widely known, he successfully fired kerosene and tetra-
nitromethane. This work, however, was not followed up.
Late in 1931 Klaus Riedel of the VfR designed a motor for a new com-
bination, and it was fired early in 1932. It used liquid oxygen, as usual, but
the fuel, conceived by Riedel and Willy Ley, was a 60–40 mixture of ethyl
alcohol and water. The performance was somewhat below that of gasoline,
but the flame temperature was much lower, cooling was simpler, and the
hardware lasted longer. This was the VfR’s major contribution to propellant
technology, leading in a straight line to the A-4 (or V-2) and it was its last.
Wernher von Braun started work on his PhD thesis on rocket combustion
phenomena at Kummersdorf-West in November 1932 under Army sponsor-
ship, the Gestapo moved in on the rest of the VfR, and the society was dead
by the end of 1933.
Dr. Eugen Sänger, at the University of Vienna, made a long series of firings
during 1931 and 1932. His propellants were conventional enough—liquid (or
sometimes gaseous) oxygen and a light fuel oil—but he introduced an inge-
nious chemical wrinkle to get his motor firing. He filled the part of his fuel
line next to the motor with diethyl zinc, to act as what we now call a “hyper-
golic starting slug.” When this was injected into the motor and hit the oxygen
it ignited spontaneously, so that when the fuel oil arrived the fire was already
burning nicely. He also compiled a long list, the first of many, of possible fuels,
ranging from hydrogen to pure carbon, and calculated the performance of
each with oxygen and with N2O5. (The latter, being not only unstable, but a
solid to boot, has naturally never been used.) Unfortunately, in his calculations
 How It Started • 7

he somewhat naively assumed 100 percent thermal efficiency, which would

involve either (a) an infinite chamber pressure, or (b) a zero exhaust pressure
firing into a perfect vacuum, and in either case would require an infinitely long
nozzle, which might involve some difficulties in fabrication. (Thermal efficien-
cies in a rocket usually run around 50 or 60 percent.) He also suggested that
ozone might be used as an oxidizer, and as had Tsander, that powdered alumi-
num might be added to the fuel.
Then Luigi Crocco, in Italy, had another idea, and was able to talk the Min-
istry of Aviation into putting up a bit of money to try it out. The idea was
that of a monopropellant. A monopropellant is a liquid which contains in
itself both the fuel and the oxidizer, either as a single molecule such as methyl
nitrate, CH3NO3 in which the oxygens can burn the carbon and the hydro-
gens, or as a mixture of a fuel and an oxidizer, such as a solution of ben-
zene in N2O4. On paper, the idea looks attractive. You have only one fluid to
inject into the chamber, which simplifies your plumbing, your mixture ratio is
built in and stays where you want it, you don’t have to worry about building an
injector which will mix the fuel and the oxidizer properly, and things are sim-
pler all around. But! Any intimate mixture of a fuel and an oxidizer is a poten-
tial explosive, and a molecule with one reducing (fuel) end and one oxidizing
end, separated by a pair of firmly crossed fingers, is an invitation to disaster.
All of which Crocco knew. But with a species of courage which can be dis-
tinguished only with difficulty from certifiable lunacy, he started in 1932 on a
long series of test firings with nitroglycerine (no less!) only sightly tranquilized
by the addition of 30 percent of methyl alcohol. By some miracle he managed
to avoid killing himself, and he extended the work to the somewhat less sensi-
tive nitromethane, CH3NO2. His results were promising, but the money ran
out in 1935, and nothing much came of the investigation.
Another early monopropellant investigator was Harry W. Bull, who worked
on his own at the University of Syracuse. By the middle of 1932 he had used
gaseous oxygen to burn gasoline, ether, kerosene, fuel oil, and alcohol. Later
he tried, without success, to burn alcohol with 30 percent hydrogen peroxide
(the highest strength available in the U.S. at the time), and to burn turpentine
with (probably 70 percent) nitric acid. Then, in 1934 he tried a monopropel-
lant of his own invention, which he called “Atalene,” but did not otherwise
identify. It exploded and put him in the hospital. Dead end.
And Helmuth Walter, at the Chemical State Institute in Berlin, in 1934
and 1935 developed a monopropellant motor which fired 80 percent hydrogen
peroxide, which had only lately become available. When suitably catalyzed, or
when heated, hydrogen peroxide decomposes into oxygen and superheated
steam, and thus can be used as a monopropellant. This work was not made
public—the Luftwaffe could see uses for it—but it was continued and led to
many things in the next few years.
8 • Ignition!

The last strictly prewar work that should be considered is that of Frank
Malina’s group at GALCIT. (Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratories, Cali-
fornia Institute of Technology.) In February of 1936 he planned his PhD thesis
project, which was to be the development of a liquid-fueled sounding rocket.
The group that was to do the job was gradually assembled, and was complete
by the summer of 1937: six people, included Malina himself, John W. Parsons,
the chemist of the group, Weld Arnold, who put up a little money, and Hsu
Shen Tsien, who, thirty years later, was to win fame as the creator of Com-
munist China’s ballistic missiles. The benign eye of Theodore von Kármán
watched over the whole.
The first thing to do was to learn how to run a liquid rocket motor, and
experimental firings, with that object in view, started in October 1936. Meth-
anol and gaseous oxygen were the propellants. But other propellants were
considered, and by June 1937, Parsons had compiled lists, and calculated the
performances (assuming, as had Sänger, 100 percent efficiency) of dozens of
propellant combinations. In addition to Sänger’s fuels, he listed various alco-
hols and saturated and unsaturated hydrocarbons, and such exotic items as
lithium methoxide, dekaborane, lithium hydride, and aluminum triemethyl.
He listed oxygen, red fuming nitric acid, and nitrogen tetroxide as oxidizers.
The next combination that the group tried then, was nitrogen tetroxide and
methanol. Tests began in August 1937. But Malina, instead of working out-
doors, as any sane man would have done, was so ill advised as to conduct his
tests in the Mechanical Engineering building, which, on the occasion of a mis-
fire, was filled with a mixture of methanol and N2O4 fumes. The latter, reacting
with the oxygen and the moisture in the air, cleverly converted itself to nitric
acid, which settled corrosively on all the expensive machinery in the building.
Malina’s popularity with the establishment suffered a vertiginous drop, he and
his apparatus and his accomplices were summarily thrown out of the building,
and he was thereafter known as the head of the “suicide squad.” Pioneers are
seldom appreciated.
But the group continued work, until July 1, 1939, when, at the instigation
of General Hap Arnold, the Army Air Corps sponsored a project to develop a
JATO—a rocket unit to help heavily laden planes take off from short runways.
From now on, rocket research was to be paid for by the military, and was
to be classified. GALCIT had lost her virginity with Malina’s first explosion.
Now she had lost her amateur standing.
 2
Peenemunde
and JPL

Von Braun started work on his PhD thesis (rocket combustion processes) in
November 1932. All of his experimental work was done at Kummersdorf-West,
an artillery range near Berlin—and the Reichswehr paid the freight, and built
up a rocket establishment around him. When he got his degree, in 1937, he
was made the technical director of the organization, which was soon moved to
Peenemunde. There the A-4, better known by its propaganda name “V-2” was
designed and developed.
Very little propellant development was involved in the A-4. From the
beginning, liquid oxygen was the intended oxidizer, and 70–30 alcohol-
water mixture (as had been used by the VfR) the fuel. And Helmuth Walter’s
80 percent hydrogen peroxide was used to drive the fuel pumps. The peroxide
entered a decomposition chamber, where it was mixed with a small quantity of
a solution of calcium permanganate in water. This catalyzed its decomposition
into oxygen and superheated steam, which drove the turbines which drove the
pumps which forced the oxygen and the alcohol into the main combustion
chamber.
The A-4 was a long range strategic weapon, not designed to be fired at a
moment’s notice. It was perfectly practical to set it up, and then load it with
alcohol and oxygen just before firing. But the Reichswehr needed antiaircraft
rockets that were always ready to fire. When you get word from your forward
observers that the bombers are on the way, you don’t have time to load up a
missile with liquid oxygen. What you need is a storable propellant—one that
can be loaded into the tanks beforehand—and kept there until you push the

9
10 • Ignition!

button. You can’t do that with oxygen, which cannot be kept liquid above
–119°C, its critical temperature, by any pressure whatsoever.
The Reichswehr was rather slow to realize the need for AA rockets—maybe
they believed Hermann Goering when he boasted, “If the British ever bomb
Berlin, you can call me Meyer!”—but when they did they found that work
on storable propellants was well under way. It was, at first, concentrated at
Helmuth Walter’s Witte Werke at Kiel. As has been mentioned, high strength
hydrogen peroxide (80–83 percent) first became available in about 1934, and
Walter had fired it as a monopropellant, and the Luftwaffe was immensely
interested. Like General Arnold, in the U.S. they could appreciate the fact that
a JATO rocket would enable a bomber to take off with a heavier load than it
could normally carry, and by February 1937, a Walter hydrogen peroxide JATO
had helped a Heinkel Kadett airplane to get off the ground. Later in the year, a
rocket powered airplane was flown—again using a hydrogen peroxide motor.
The Messerschmitt 163-A interceptor used the same propellant.
But peroxide is not only a monopropellant, it’s also a pretty good oxidizer.
And Walter worked out a fuel for it that he called “C-Stoff.” (The peroxide
itself was called “T-Stoff.”) Hydrazine hydrate, N2H4∙ H2O ignited spontane-
ously when it came in contact with peroxide (Walter was probably the first
propellant man to discover such a phenomenon) and C-Stoff consisted of
30 percent hydrazine hydrate, 57 of methanol, and 13 of water, plus thirty mil-
ligrams per liter of copper as potassium cuprocyanide, to act as an ignition and
combustion catalyst. The reason for the methanol and the water was the fact
that hydrazine hydrate was hard to come by—so hard, in fact, that by the end
of the war its percentage in C-Stoff was down to fifteen. The Messerschmitt
163-B interceptor used C-Stoff and T-Stoff.
The next organization to get into the rocket business was the Aeronauti-
cal Research Institute at Braunschweig. There, in 1937–38, Dr. Otto Lutz and
Dr. Wolfgang C. Noeggerath started to work on the C-Stoff-T-Stoff combi-
nation. Next, BMW (Bavarian Motor Works—yes, the people who make the
motorcycles) were invited by the Luftwaffe to get into the act. Helmut Philip
von Zborowski, the nephew of the famous pre-World War 1 racing driver, was
in charge of the operation, and Heinz Mueller was his second. In the summer
of 1939 BMW got a contract to develop a JATO unit, using the C-T-Stoff
combination, and they worked with it for some months. But von Zborowski
was convinced that 98 percent nitric acid was the better oxidizer, as well as
being immensely easier to get (I.G. Farben guaranteed unlimited quantities),
and set out to convert the brass to his point of view. From the beginning of
1940, he and Mueller worked on the nitric acid–methanol combination, and
in 1941 proved his point, convincingly, with a perfect thirty-second run at the
three thousand pounds force thrust level. He even convinced Eugen Sänger,
who was sure that oxygen was the only oxidizer worth thinking about.
 Peenemunde and JPL • 11

And in the meantime, early in 1940, he and Mueller had made an immensely
important discovery—that certain fuels (aniline and turpentine were the first
they found) ignited spontaneously upon contact with nitric acid. Noeggerath
learned of this, and joined the BMW people in their search for fuels with this
interesting property. His code name for nitric acid was “Ignol” and for his fuels
“Ergol,” and, a fast man with a Greek root, he came up with “Hypergol” for
the spontaneous igniters. “Hypergol” and its derivatives, such as the adjective
“hypergolic” have become a permanent part not only of the German, but of
the English language, and even, in spite of the efforts of Charles de Gaulle to
keep the language “pure,” of the French as well.
The discovery of hypergolicity was of major importance. Running a
rocket motor is relatively easy. Shutting it down without blowing something
up is harder. But starting it up without disaster is a real problem. Sometimes
electrical igniters are used—sometimes pyrotechnic devices. But neither can
always be trusted, and either is a nuisance, an added complication, when you
already have more complications than you want. Obviously, if your combi-
nation is hypergolic, you can throw out all the ignition schemes and devices,
and let the chemistry do the work. The whole business is much simpler and
more reliable.
But as usual, there’s a catch. If your propellants flow into the chamber and
ignite immediately, you’re in business. But if they flow in, collect in a pud-
dle, and then ignite, you have an explosion which generally demolishes the
engine and its immediate surroundings. The accepted euphemism for this
sequence of events is a “hard start.” Thus, a hypergolic combustion must be
very fast, or it is worse than useless. The Germans set an upper limit of 50 mil-
liseconds on the ignition delay that they could tolerate.
Incidentally, and to keep the record straight, Zborowski named his propel-
lants after plants. Nitric acid he called “Salbei” for sage, and his fuels “Tonka,”
after the bean from which coumarin, which smells like vanilla, is extracted.
Considering the odors of the things he worked with, I can’t think of more
inappropriate names!
The first ignition delay tests were, to put it mildly, somewhat primitive.
After a long night session, searching through old chemistry texts for sub-
stances that were violently reactive with nitric acid, Zborowski and Mueller
would soak a wiping rag with a promising candidate and spray it with nitric
acid and see how quickly—or if—it burst into flames. And they ran into a
peculiar phenomenon. An old, used wiping rag from the machine shop would
sometimes ignite much faster than a new clean one soaked with the same fuel.
Their chemistry laboratory furnished them with the answer. Traces of iron and
copper from the shop, as the metals or as salts, catalyzed the ignition reaction.
So they modified their 98 percent nitric acid, “Salbei” by adding to it 6 percent
of hydrated ferric chloride, and called the new oxidizer “Salbeik.”
Another random document with
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moment fortune seemed to favor them. The latter had indeed, in
connection with their other preparations, made particular efforts to
stir the provinces round Tlascala and toward the coast, sending large
garrisons to form centres for the native armies, the object being
partly to cut off communication with the coast, so as to prevent
reinforcements from reaching the Spaniards, and partly to effect a
rear movement when it might be decided to attack the republic.
Reinforcements had already been surprised in this region and
slaughtered, as we have seen, and raids had been made on the
allied frontier.
Here was all the cause the Spaniards required for attack, and as
the country was for the most part open, the horsemen would have
great advantage over native troops. Its subjugation, therefore,
promised to be easy, and would secure the rear. The Tlascaltecs
approved of beginning the campaign with the outlying provinces,[925]
where the concentration of forces was smaller, and where the
memory of Aztec misrule and oppression might readily induce the
inhabitants to transfer their allegiance, so as to strengthen the
conquerors and allure fresh allies. They were eager to begin the
campaign, and offered a large force of warriors. Xicotencatl junior
also evinced a promptness to coöperate, as if to remove any ill
feeling that might have arisen from his machinations.[926] In order to
thoroughly enlist their sympathies Cortés made an arrangement with
the lords whereby a number of privileges were assured to their
people, together with a fixed proportion of the spoils[927] to be
obtained during the war.
The troops were mustered at Tzompantzinco, near Tlascala,
amidst a large concourse of people. There were about four hundred
and fifty Spanish soldiers, with nearly twenty horses, a few firelocks
and field-pieces, and a number of cross-bows, but the arms were
chiefly swords and pikes. The reinforcements consisted of six
thousand Tlascaltecs, including a few Cholultecs and Huexotzincas,
a larger force being prepared under Xicotencatl to follow later.[928] A
demand had meanwhile been sent to Tepeaca to confirm the oath of
allegiance once tendered the Spanish sovereign and dismiss the
Aztec garrisons, whereupon all past offences would be forgiven. The
reply was a contemptuous refusal, with the threat that any attempt at
coercion would bring upon the invaders worse punishment than they
had received at Mexico, for they all would be dished up at the festive
board. Every proposal being rejected, a formal notice was sent
condemning the province to be chastised with sword, and fire, and
slavery, for rebellion and murder of Spaniards.[929]
The army now advanced on Zacatepec, the first town on the
Tepeaca border, where an ambuscade had been prepared in some
maize fields. This was discovered in time to prevent a surprise, but a
fierce encounter took place, wherein the horsemen did good
execution, and victory was soon obtained, with slaughter of the
flying. Ojeda, who had led the Tlascaltecs into the thickest of the
fight, came during the pursuit to the residence of the cacique and
planted there the republican flag, in token of capture. These warriors
had suffered severely, owing in part to the use of large lances by the
enemy, but the Spaniards had only a dozen wounded, beside two
horses, one of which died.[930] During the three days’ stay at this
town the neighborhood was reduced, with pillage and enslavement.
The next camp was formed at Acatzingo, which had been
abandoned by the enemy after a short fight. These successes so
discouraged the Mexican garrisons that they abandoned the
province, and the allies, on marching straight for Tepeaca, five days
later, entered it without opposition. This now became the
headquarters for the different expeditions sent out to reduce the
surrounding districts;[931] and rare work they made of it, plundering,
and tearing down idols, and making captives. Salt, cotton, feather
ware, and other commodities were abundant, and with their share
therein the Tlascaltecs were highly delighted, but the Spaniards
obtained little gold. The rulers of the country had fled; one of them to
Mexico, to remonstrate against the retreat of the garrisons, and to
demand additional aid. Finding themselves abandoned, the
inhabitants sent to beg mercy of the conquerors, and being assured
that no further harm should be done them, they returned to the city
and again tendered allegiance. Several other towns were taken,
some, like Tecalco, south of Tepeaca, being evacuated, others
tendering submission in advance, while still others required hard
fighting to subdue.
The reduction of the Tepeaca province, which was virtually
accomplished in about a month,[932] produced an immediate and
marked effect, not only on the natives, but on the late refractory
Spanish soldiers. The latter were reconciled to the prosecution of the
conquest on finding the opening campaign so speedy and
comparatively bloodless, and fresh confidence was infused into the
Tlascaltecs, and new allies came forward, while the prestige of
Spanish arms began again to spread terror among the enemy and
open a way into other provinces. This was promoted by messengers,
who carried promises of release from Aztec tyranny, and pointed out
the fate of rebellious and stubborn Tepeacan towns. The Mexicans,
who during the inactivity of the allies had grown somewhat lax in
their efforts to conciliate subject provinces, now became more
earnest, more free with presents and offers to remit tribute. These
endeavors were greatly counteracted by their troops, however,
whose insolence and greed drove the inhabitants to tacitly or openly
favor the Spaniards.
The withdrawal of the Aztec garrisons from Tepeaca served to
strengthen those on its frontier, particularly at Quauhquechollan,[933]
ten or eleven leagues south-west of the new Spanish head-quarters,
which protected the approach to the southern pass into the valley of
Mexico.[934] Its province bordered on Huexotzinco and Cholula, and
skirting the snow-crowned Popocatepetl it extended for some
distance south and south-east of it. The lord,[935] who had tendered
allegiance to Spain simultaneously with Montezuma, had recently
sent in the assurance of his loyalty, with the explanation that fear of
the Mexicans had prevented him from doing so before. A few days
later came his messengers to ask protection against the Aztec
garrisons, reinforced to the extent of some thirty thousand men,[936]
who, from their camp within a league of the city, were plundering and
committing outrages. This appeal being quite in accord with the
plans of Cortés, he at once complied by sending Olid and Ordaz,
with two hundred soldiers, thirteen horses, most of the fire-arms and
cross-bows, and thirty thousand allies.[937] It was arranged with the
Quauhquechollans that they should begin the attack as soon as the
Spaniards came near, and cut off communication between the city
garrison and the adjoining camp.
Olid marched by way of Cholula, and received en route large
accessions of volunteers, chiefly from the province to be aided and
from Huexotzinco, all eager for a safe blow at the Aztecs, and for a
share of the spoils. So large, indeed, was the enrolment that some of
the ever timid men of Narvaez conjured up from this a plot for their
betrayal into the hands of the Mexicans, with whom rumor filled
every house at Quauhquechollan, making in all a larger number than
at Otumba. The loyalty of the new province being wholly untried, and
that of Huexotzinco but little proven, the alarm appeared not
unfounded, and even the leaders became so infected as to march
back to Cholula, whence the chiefs of the suspected allies were sent
under guard to Cortés, with a report of the occurrence.[938] The latter
examined the prisoners, and readily surmised the cause of the
trouble; but, as it would not answer to dampen native ardor for the
war by leaving them in that suspicion, he apologized for what had
happened as a misunderstanding, smoothed their ruffled feelings
with presents, and encouraged their zeal. With an additional force of
one hundred soldiers and some horses he set out for Cholula to
assume command in person, shaming the men out of their fears,[939]
and accepting the large reinforcements which were offered on the
way.
As soon as he came in sight, at the end of the valley, the
Quauhquechollans, who had made their preparations in advance, fell
on the garrison, securing at the same time the scouts and stragglers.
The Aztecs resisted valiantly, encompassed though they were by
assailants who filled the roofs and heights round the temple which
formed the citadel. An entry was effected by the Spaniards, and the
natives rushed upon the warriors with such fury that scarcely one
was left to tell the tale. A number of the besieged, outside the citadel,
had already fled toward the Aztec camp, whose battalions were now
descending, brilliant in feathered mail and ornaments. Entering the
further side of the city they began to fire it. Cortés was summoned to
the rescue, and hurrying onward with the cavalry he soon routed
their disorganized masses, leaving pursuit chiefly to the allies. At a
certain pass the enemy rallied, to be dislodged within a few moments
and cut off from their camp. Exhausted by battle and flight, under a
broiling sun, they turned in disorderly scramble up the steep
mountain slope, only to find themselves checked on the summit by
fleeter bands of Quauhquechollans and other allies, and obliged to
make a stand. By this time they could hardly raise their hands in self-
defence, and the battle became little more than a butchery, during
which scattered remnants alone managed to escape, leaving the rich
garments and jewels of the dead to stay the pursuers, who now,
according to Cortés, numbered over one hundred thousand. Several
Spaniards were wounded, and one horse killed.[940] The field being
reaped, the victors entered the camp,[941] which was divided into
three parts, each large enough, it is said, to form a respectable town,
well appointed, with hosts of servants, supplies, and paraphernalia.
Laden with spoils they returned to the city to receive a well merited
ovation. The citizens were afterward rewarded with several privileges
for their loyal aid;[942] deservedly rewarded, for without their
coöperation the place could not have been captured without
difficulty, since it lay between two rivers[943] coursing through deep
ravines, and was shielded on one side by a steep mountain range.
Beside its natural strength the city was protected by a breastwork of
masonry, which extended toward the mountain and down into the
ravines, forming here a smooth facing of some twenty feet, and
rising in other places into a distinct wall of great height and width,
[944]with a parapet. There were four entrances,[945] wide enough for
one horseman only, with staircase approaches, and with maze-like
lappings of the walls, which rendered it difficult to force an entrance.
Along the walls lay piles of stones and rocks ready for the foe. The
population was estimated at five or six thousand families, supported
in part by a number of gardens within the city, and subject to it were
three towns in the valley, containing an equal number of people.

Four leagues south of Quauhquechollan lay Itzocan,[946] a well

built city, with a hundred temples, says Cortés, and a population of
three or four thousand families, situated in a fertile, irrigated valley,
which from the climatic protection afforded by the sheltering
mountains included cotton as one of its staples, and had also some
attractive gold mines. The place lay at the foot of a hill, surmounted
by a strong turreted fort, and offered a striking resemblance to
Málaga, it was said. The level sides were protected by the banks of a
deep river, which here formed a semicircle, and all round the city ran
a wall five feet high, well provided with towers and stone
ammunition. The cacique was an alien, appointed by Montezuma,
whose niece he had married, and possessed strong sympathies for
the lake government, which maintained a fine garrison. To reduce
the place, so as to root out a stronghold for the dissemination of
Aztec influence, was of the first importance.
Thither, therefore, Cortés proceeded with his forces, including
allies, who were by this time so numerous as to cover the plains and
mountains, wherever the eye could reach, representing at least one
hundred and twenty-five thousand men. On arriving before the city it
was found occupied only by warriors, estimated at from five to eight
thousand, the women and children having all withdrawn. Guided by
natives the army passed to a point affording a comparatively easy
entrance. The surprised garrison now thought less of resistance than
of securing their retreat across the river. It was spanned by a bridge,
but this the Spaniards destroyed as they fell upon them, and many of
the unfortunate Aztecs took to the water in their confusion, only to
add to the list of victims. The cavalry, swimming across with ease,
overtook and arrested a large portion of the flying till the allies came
up to aid in the slaughter.[947] Two captives were sent to offer pardon
to the inhabitants, on the condition of their returning and remaining
loyal. Soon after the chiefs came to make arrangements, and within
a few days the city had resumed its wonted appearance.
Cortés thought it the best policy, in this frontier town of his
conquest, to make a favorable impression by extending mercy, and
with the rapid flight of his fame as an irresistible conqueror spread
also his reputation as a dispenser of justice, lenient or severe, as the
case might be. A number of caciques hastened accordingly to
propitiate him, during his stay in this quarter,[948] by tendering
submission and praying to be confirmed in authority. Among them
came a deputation from the inhabitants of Ocopetlahuacan,[949] at
the foot of Popocatepetl, who cast the blame for delay on their
cacique. He had fled with the retreating Mexicans, and they
disowned him, praying that the dignity might be conferred on his
brother, who had remained, and who shared the popular desire for
Spanish supremacy. After a judicious hesitation the request was
granted, with the intimation that future disobedience would be
severely chastised.[950]
Still more flattering overtures came from the caciques of eight
towns in Cohuaixtlahuacan,[951] some forty leagues to the south,
who had already tendered allegiance on the occasion when Pilot
Umbría first passed through that province in search of Zacatula’s
gold mines.[952]
Before leaving Itzucan, Cortés was called upon to appoint a
successor to the fugitive cacique. The candidates were a bastard
son of the late native cacique, whose death was due to Montezuma,
and the son of the deceased ruler’s legitimate daughter, married to
the lord of Quauhquechollan. The general, being only too eager to
please so loyal an ally, decided in favor of his son, on the ground of
legitimacy; but since he was not yet ten years old, the regency was
intrusted to the bastard uncle, aided by some chiefs.[953] The boy
followed the army to imbibe Spanish ideas and instruction, and
received baptism not long after, with the name of Alonso,[954] the first
Christian prince in New Spain.
Another important yet troublesome expedition was to secure the
road to Villa Rica, on which so many Spaniards had fallen, and
which was still dangerous. It was intrusted to two hundred men, with
ten horses, and a large force of allies.[955] The first reduction in this
quarter had been Quecholac, where pillage and enslavement formed
the retaliation for murders committed,[956] and Tecamachalco, which
gave greater trouble before it fell, and yielded over two thousand
slaves, besides much spoil.[957] The chastisement of these districts
had taught the easterly parts a lesson, so that more hardship than
fighting was now encountered, for the march lay to a great extent
through uninhabited tracts. It was in the region of Las Lagunas that
some captive Spaniards had been denuded and fattened, and then
goaded to death, like bulls in a ring, for the amusement of the
natives. The bodies had then been devoured, a part of the flesh
being jerked and distributed over the district as choice morsels, and
pronounced savory. Forty of the most guilty tormentors were secured
in a yard for execution. Informed of their fate they began to dance
and sing, commending themselves quite cheerfully to the gods as
they bent their heads to the sword.[958] How blessed the righteous
when they die!

FOOTNOTES
[901] This appears to have taken place on the Xocotlan road, followed by the
Spaniards on first entering the country, for in the temple of this town, says Bernal
Diaz, were found the saddles and other trophies. He estimates the treasure lost at
40,000 pesos. Hist. Verdad., 108, 116-117; Lejalde, Probanza, in Icazbalceta, Col.
Doc., i. 425.

[902] Herrera writes, under Iuste and Morla. If correct there were two Morlas.

[903] Herrera copies this account, but gives also another in an earlier chapter,
which leads one to suppose that Yuste and a few companions escaped to the
mountains. They either perished of hunger or were captured at some settlement
while offering the remnant of their treasures for food. An inscription by Yuste on a
piece of bark recorded their sufferings. ‘Por aqui passò el desdichado Iuan Iuste,
con sus desdichados compañeros, con tãta hambre, que por pocas tortillas de
mayz, diò vno vna barra de oro, que pesaua ochocientos ducados.’ dec. ii. lib. x.
cap. xiii.; dec. iii. lib. i. cap. v. Torquemada repeats both versions, i. 530-1. Peter
Martyr and Gomara are also confused, allowing the Yuste party in one page to fall
at the pass, and on another to turn back to Villa Rica from Tlascala. Hist. Mex.,
165, 181-2. A misinterpretation of a vague passage by Cortés is the cause of the
mistake, into which nearly every writer has fallen. The party carried, according to
the Cartas, 141, 183-4, a number of agreements with the natives, and other
valuable documents, beside Cortés’ personal effects and valuables, worth over
30,000 pesos de oro. Bernal Diaz says three loads of gold. The inhabitants said
that people from Tezcuco and Mexico had done the deed to avenge Cacama. But
none except the natives of the district could have had time to gather for the attack.
[904] Herrera places the number of the party at 50 or 60. dec. ii. lib. x. cap. xv.
Bernal Diaz speaks of the slaughter in Tochtepec of 72 men and 5 women, and he
leaves the impression that they were a part of the Narvaez force which had
followed the army at their leisure. Hist. Verdad., 108. This is no doubt the party
described in the text. Yet Herrera, in cap. xvii., refers to the destruction at
Tochtepec of a force of 80 men under Captain Salcedo, who was sent to reduce
this province a few months later. This incident, mentioned by no other original
authority, may be identical with the preceding. Had the party in question belonged
to the original force of Narvaez it would have accompanied Yuste and Alcántara.
Such not being the case, it must have arrived after their departure. This receives
confirmation from Gomara’s statement that several small parties, who had been
attracted to New Spain by Cortés’ conquests, were killed in Tepeaca and
Xalacinco. Hist. Mex., 173. The narratives of Bernal Diaz and Cortés specify some
of these, numbering from ten to eighteen men, who fell at Quecholac, Tepeaca,
and other places. It is not likely that so many small parties could have arrived on
the coast during the short interval of Cortés’ departure from Cempoala and his
retreat to Tlascala; nor that they would have ventured in small numbers into a
strange country, during so unquiet a period; nor would a mere dozen have been
allowed to penetrate so far as Tepeaca ere they met their fate. Hence they must
have belonged to the large party spoken of in the text, whose members, dead or
captive, were distributed among the different towns which had aided in their
defeat. This appears to be the only way to reconcile the differing statements,
which have so confused every writer as to lead them into apparent blunders or into
the omission of facts. See Robertson’s Hist. Am., ii. 99; Prescott’s Mex., ii. 409-10;
Brasseur de Bourbourg, Hist. Nat. Civ., iv. 353-5.

[905] Bernal Diaz intimates that only two vessels remained of Narvaez’ fleet, and
one of these was now destroyed so that the crew might be sent to Tlascala. The
reinforcements numbered four soldiers and three sailors, two of whom suffered
from swollen stomachs, and the rest from venereal diseases. Hist. Verdad., 109.

[906] Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 109, mentions only four deaths.

[907] ‘Se le pasmo la cabeça, o porque no le curaron bien, sacãdole cascos: o por
el demasiado trabajo.’ Gomara, Hist. Mex., 162. Solis describes the progress of
the cure with a minuteness that would do credit to a medical journal. Hist. Mex., ii.
212-14.

[908] The Cihuacohuatl, Tzihuacpopocatzin, Cipocatli, and Tencuecuenotzin. The

account of this tumult is given in a memorial on the conquest by an Indian,
possessed by Torquemada. i. 509-10. Brasseur de Bourbourg assumes
Tzihuacpopocatzin and the Cihuacohuatl to be sons of Tizoc, and the last two to
be the sons of Montezuma, the last named a bastard. Cipocatli, accepted by him
as the other name for Asupacaci, the legitimate heir of the emperor, he assumes
with Cano to have been murdered by Quauhtemotzin. Hist. Nat. Civ., iv. 345. But
we have seen that Cortés appears more correct in saying that the prince fell with
him during the Noche Triste. Brasseur de Bourbourg’s assumption serves merely
to show how hasty and untrustworthy his statements often are.

[909] Cortés assumes only two rivals, the natural sons of Montezuma, ‘el uno diz
que es loco y el otro perlático.’ Cartas, 153.

[910] Twenty days after Montezuma’s death. Ixtlilxochitl, Relaciones, 413, 304.

[911] Of which Sahagun gives some account. Hist. Conq. (ed. 1840), 137. See
also Torquemada, i. 511.

[912] ‘Él les hace gracia por un año de todos los tributos y servicios que son
obligados á le hacer.’ Cortés, Cartas, 155; Gomara, Hist. Mex., 173.

[913] Beaumont, Crón. Mich., MS., 68 etc.; Native Races, ii. 107-8; v. 508 et seq.

[914] ‘Entrarian en parte de todas las rentas de las provincias sugetas por el
imperio.’ Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., 304.

[915] ‘Tanto supieron decir á la señoría estos embajadores, que casi toda ella, ...
la redugeron á su voluntad y deseo.’ Old Xicotencatl being one of the most
devoted. Id. Herrera also assumes that this chief favors the Mexicans, but the
supposition is due to confounding the two men of this name. dec. ii. lib. x. cap. xiv.

[916] ‘A q̄ venistes, a comernos nuestra hazienda, anda que boluistes

destroçados de Mexico, echados como viles mugeres.’ Id.

[917] Bernal Diaz assumes that the young chief had been brought before the
council a prisoner, to be arraigned for his machinations. His father was so deeply
incensed against him as to decree his death, but the other chiefs were lenient out
of respect for the father; the conspirators were arrested. Hist. Verdad., 109-10. A
later writer states, on doubtful authority, that the chieftain was also removed from
the command of the army; and Solis assumes that the act of jostling him down the
steps in the council-hall was the form of degradation, which took place during a
special session, after the deliberation. He appealed to Cortés, who caused him to
be reinstated. Hist. Mex., ii. 220-3. According to Camargo, the elder Xicotencatl
had ceded his place as ruler to the son, owing to his advanced age. Hist. Tlax.,
173-4. In such a case no imprisonment or degradation could have been admitted;
perhaps in no case, since he merely advocated what he considered to be the best
for the country. Duran states that he was surrendered to Cortés, who ‘le puso en
prisiones, y creo que al cabo le mandó matar,’ Hist. Ind., MS., ii. 485, a statement
which may have aided to confuse Gomara, who allows Cortés to execute him
already during his first stay at Tlascala. On the present occasion he lets
Maxixcatzin strike the leader of the opposite faction. Hist. Mex., 90, 164. His
blunder and vagueness helped Herrera to confound the two Xicotencatls, and
Brasseur de Bourbourg to attribute to father and son the same opinion. Hist. Nat.
Civ., iv. 365-7. This is also the view of Ixtlilxochitl. The discussion was held in the
hall or oratory of Xicotencatl, where Cortés had planted the cross. While
Maxixcatzin was advocating the Spanish cause a cloud settled on the cross and
darkened the room. This miracle encouraged the orator, who threw down the
younger Xicotencatl and won all to his side. The Mexican envoys were now
dismissed with a refusal, whereupon the cloud dissipated, leaving the room bright
and the cross resplendent, and attracting many believers. Hist. Chich., 304-5.
Sahagun allows Xicotencatl, chief among the lords, to attack the second lord for
urging the murder of the Spaniards. Hist. Conq. (ed. 1840), 138.

[918] With reference to the attack on Xicotencatl in the council-chamber, Herrera

says, ‘Sin tener los Mexicanos otra respuesta se boluieron, con relacion de lo que
passaua,’ dec. ii. lib. x. cap. xiv., a sentence which Clavigero elaborates into a
flight of the envoy on observing the agitation of the people. ‘E’ però da credersi,
che il Senato mandasse degli Ambasciatori Tlascallesi per portar la risposta.’
Storia Mess., iii. 149. Prescott and others also suppose that they fled; but this is
unlikely, since personages so conspicuous as envoys could hardly have escaped
from the centre of the republic without the knowledge of the senate, who had,
beside, given them a guard, as well for their honor and protection as for preventing
the undue exercise of their curiosity. Envoys enjoyed great respect among these
peoples. Camargo and Ixtlilxochitl assume more correctly that the envoys were
notified and dismissed.

[919] Tlascala sealed her enslavement, as some view it, ignoring national interests
for the sake of shameful revenge. Behold now the punishment in her decay, and in
the odium cast on her descendants by other peoples. So says Bustamante, in
Sahagun, Hist. Conq. (ed. 1840), 140. They have certainly dwindled away ever
since Cortés began to scatter them as colonists in different directions; but this was
the natural and inevitable consequence of the presence of the stronger element.
During Spanish dominion they enjoyed some slight privileges, and since then no
odium has attached to them except in casual references to the conquest by
prejudiced writers.

[920] ‘En nombre de todos.’ Gomara, Hist. Mex., 166. Whereat Bernal Diaz is
exceedingly wroth. ‘We, the old soldiers, stood by Cortés,’ he asserts, ‘and
Gomara’s omission to say so is intended to exalt him at our expense.’ Hist.
Verdad., 110. Cortés himself intimates that the request was general. Cartas, 142.
But Herrera more justly attributes it to ‘la mayor parte.’ dec. ii. lib. x. cap. xiv.
[921] ‘Si mal nos sucediere la ida [of the next campaign] hare lo que pedis: y si
bien, hareis lo que os ruego.’ Thus Cortés, by his skill and firmness, saved not
only the conquest but the lives of his men, which must have been sacrificed in a
retreat. Had they reached Villa Rica they would not have remained there, but
would have passed on to the islands, thus abandoning the country. Gomara, Hist.
Mex., 167. Most of the points in the above speech are to be found in the lengthy
harangue prepared by this author. Oviedo’s is weaker, and loses itself in
repetitions and crude elaborations, adorned with learned references ill suiting a
soldier addressing rude men, although not altogether inconsistent with Cortés’
love of display. Toward the conclusion is said: ‘If any one there is who still insists
on leaving, let him go; for rather will I remain with a small and brave number than
with many, if composed in part of cowards and of those who respect not their
honor. Even if all fail in their duty I shall not. We shall now know who, being of us,
will drink water from the hand, and who will kneel to drink with the face to the
ground, so that they may be bidden to depart, as God said to Gideon.’ Oviedo, iii.
332-3. The test, if ever intended, was not made, since all acquiesced. Solis, the
inveterate speech-maker, has unaccountably subsided for this period; perhaps he
is piqued at finding himself so fully anticipated. Cortés gives a brief synopsis of
what he indicates to have been a long speech. On no account would he commit so
shameful, dangerous, and treasonable an act as to abandon the country. Cartas,
142-3; Clavigero, Storia Mess., iii. 151; Herrera, dec. ii. lib. x. cap. xiv.

[922] ‘Habiendo estado en esta provincia veinte dias, aunque ni yo estaba muy
sano de mis heridas, y los de mi compañia todavía bien flacos, salí della.’ Cortés,
143. Gomara follows, while Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 110, writes that after a stay
at Tlascala of 22 days Cortés announced the determination to march on Tepeaca,
which provoked murmurs from the men of Narvaez. Preparations for the campaign
appear to have intervened before the march began, and negotiations with the
province to be assailed. Herrera intimates that fully 50 days had passed before
negotiations were opened. dec. ii. lib. x. cap. xv.

[923] ‘Significa Tepeyacac, remate, o punta de zerro,’ owing to the position of the
city at the end of a mountain range. Id., cap. xxi.

[924] Their father, Chichtuc, had been sole ruler, but after his death the sons
divided the province. Id. This author assumes that it was merely an ally of Mexico,
but there is little doubt about its being tributary. ‘Ixcozauhqui, le principal de ses
trois chefs.’ Brasseur de Bourbourg, Hist. Nat. Civ., iv. 368.

[925] The suggestion of thus opening the campaign is claimed by native historians
for the Tlascaltec lords, Ixtlilxochitl naming Xicotencatl as the originator. Hist.
Chich., 303; Camargo, Hist. Tlax., 177.

[926] And out of gratitude for Cortés’ intercession in his behalf, as Solis claims.
[927] Half of the booty obtained in all conquered countries, with incorporation of
Cholula, Huexotzinco, and Tepeyacac. Camargo, Hist. Tlax., 176. This extent of
jurisdiction is doubtful. ‘Les haria en nõbre de su Magestad escriptura de
conservarlos en sus tierras, y govierno,’ is the moderate arrangement given in
Vetancvrt, Teatro Mex., pt. iii. 146. When in 1655 an attempt was made to
encroach on their rights they produced the document and obtained justice.

[928] Bernal Diaz, who alone enters into details, enumerates 420 soldiers, 4000
Tlascaltecs, 17 horses, and 6 cross-bows, without artillery or ammunition. Hist.
Verdad., 111. But this is hardly reliable, for a few lines before he refers to 440
men, and there is no doubt that some ammunition, field-pieces, and other war
material must have been obtained from Villa Rica. Herrera speaks of musketeers
and 6000 allies, 50,000 more to follow. dec. ii. lib. x. cap. xv. Gomara allows
40,000 allies to set out at once, with provisions and carriers. Hist. Mex., 168.
Ixtlilxochitl mentions only 4000, and names some of the leaders. Hist. Chich., 305.
Herrera states that a question arose as to the prudence of trusting so small a body
of soldiers with so large a force of allies—which soon swelled to over 100,000—
who might in case of disagreement overwhelm them. A council was held, which
decided that the loyalty of the Tlascaltecs had been sufficiently tried, and that a
small number of allies would be of no service. ubi sup., cap. xiv.

[929] Cortés’ first messengers returned with two Mexicans, who brought the
contemptuous reply. They were given presents, and told to summon the native
chiefs to a parley. On their return with a threatening answer ‘fue acordado, ... por
ante Escriuano ... que se diessen por esclauos à todos los aliados de Mexico, que
huviessen muerto Españoles.’ Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 112. ‘Respondieron que
si mataron Españoles fue con justa razon, pues en tiempo de guerra quisieron
passar por su tierra por fuerça, y sin demandar licencia.’ Gomara, Hist. Mex., 168.

[930] ‘Tuuierõ los Indios amigos buena cena aquella noche de piernas, y braços,
porque sin los assadores de palo, que eran infinitos, huuo cincuenta mil ollas de
carne humana.’ The Spaniards suffered from want of water and food. Herrera,
dec. ii. lib. x. cap. xv. Rather a strong story. The Spaniards could not well suffer
from hunger in the midst of maize fields, in harvest time. Oviedo takes occasion to
dwell on the common practice of devouring the slain on the battle-field, thus
saving the trouble of burial. iii. 334. ‘Mi pare una favola,’ is Clavigero’s comment.
Storia Mess., iii. 152. See Native Races.

[931] ‘Padeciendo siempre de agua, y comida.’ Herrera, ubi sup. But this could
hardly be the case in so rich a province, at this time.

[932] ‘En obra de veinte dias hobe pacíficas muchas villas y poblaciones á ella
sujetas ... sin que en toda la dicha guerra me matasen ni hiriesen ni un español.’
Cortés, Cartas, 143. ‘En obra de quarenta dias tuvimos aquellos pueblos
pacificos,’ but with great hardship, ‘porque de sangre, y polvo que estaua quajado
en las entrañas, no echauamos otra cosa del cuerpo, y por la boca,’ etc. Bernal
Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 112-13.

[933] The name of a beautiful bird, now San Martin de Huaquechula. This town
was known to the Spaniards under the name of Guacachula.

[934] ‘Á la entrada de un puerto que se pasa para entrar á la provincia de Méjico

por allí.’ Cortés, Cartas, 145. After the conquest it was moved to a more open site,
three leagues south. Torquemada, i. 316.

[935] Calcozametl. Brasseur de Bourbourg, Hist. Nat. Civ., iv. 372.

[936] Herrera reduces Cortés’ figure to 20,000.

[937] Bernal Diaz names Olid alone for the command, and Gomara adds Ordaz
and Andrés de Tapia, while Herrera substitutes Ordaz and Ávila. The latter is
probably wrong in giving them 300 soldiers, and Peter Martyr errs, through his
printer, perhaps, in allowing only 3000 allies.

[938] Cortés writes that this occurred in a town of Huexotzinco province, and that
here the Spaniards were alarmed by the report of collusion between the
Huexotzincas, the Quauhquechollans, and the Aztecs. The leaders described the
expedition as difficult. Cartas, 146. Gomara follows, naming the captain who
brought the chiefs captive to Cortés. Hist. Mex., 169. Bernal Diaz points out very
plausibly that Huexotzinco lay wholly out of the way; and, ignoring the accession
of volunteers, he assumes that the report of a vast gathering of Mexican troops
round Quauhquechollan was the cause for alarm, among the Narvaez party only.
Olid appealed to their honor, and did all he could to encourage them, but failed.
Hist. Verdad., 112-13. Clavigero believes, on the other hand, that Olid caught the
alarm as readily as the rest. Storia Mess., iii. 154. The joining of Huexotzincas
may have led to the belief that the march lay through their territory.

[939] Bernal Diaz states that Cortés did not go, but sent Olid a sharp letter, which
roused him to proceed with the expedition. But our chronicler was sick with fever
all this time, and has evidently not been well informed. Cortés’ description of the
route and of different occurrences indicates that he must have been present.

[940] ‘Cayeron muchos dellos [enemy] muertos y ahogados de la calor, sin herida
ninguna, y dos caballos se estancaron, y el uno murió.’ Cortés, Cartas, 149.

[941] ‘En Mexinca.’ Gomara, Hist. Mex., 169.

[942] ‘Y se les conservan el día de hoy,’ says Lorenzana, in Cortés, Hist. N.
España, 160.

[943] ‘Dos tiros de ballesta el uno del otro.’ Cortés, Cartas, 150.

[944] ‘Tres estados en alto, y 14. pies en ancho,’ says Herrera, dec. ii. lib. x. cap.
xvi. ‘Alto como cuatro estados por de fuera de la ciudad, é por de dentro está casi
igual con el suelo.’ Cortés, Cartas, 150. Meaning, in places.

[945] Herrera says two.

[946] Later Izucar; now Matamoros.

[947] Bernal Diaz assumes that Olid is the sole leader; that he was here wounded,
and lost two horses. Returning to Tepeaca he was received with great honor, and
joined in laughing at the alarm which had caused the army to turn back at Cholula.
He would never after have anything to do with the opulent and timid soldiers of
Narvaez, he said. Hist. Verdad., 114. Gomara supposes that the bridge had been
destroyed before the flight, so that few of the garrison escaped from the sword and
the stream. Hist. Mex., 171.

[948] Ixtlilxochitl extends the stay at Ytzocan alone to twenty days. Hist. Chich.,
305. Others make it less.

[949] Cortés calls it Ocupatuyo, which Lorenzana corrects into Ocuituco, and
Torquemada into Acapetlahuaca, i. 315, while Clavigero insists that it should be
Ocopetlajoccan. Storia Mess., iii. 157.

[950] ‘Vinieron asimismo á se ofrecer por vasallos de V. M. el señor de ...

Guajocingo, y el señor de otra ciudad que está á diez leguas de Izzucan.’ Cortés,
Cartas, 152.

[951] This name is badly misspelled. Chimalpain identifies it with Huaxtéca, which
is decidedly out of the way, Hist. Conq., ii. 12, while Orozco y Berra stamps ‘en
verdad errónea’ the suggestion of Lorenzana that it is Oajaca; but modern maps
do place it in Oajaca, very slightly modified in spelling.

[952] They had always been loyal, they said, although deterred by fear of Mexico
from sooner proclaiming it; the four remaining pueblos of the province would soon
send in their allegiance. Cortés, Cartas, 152-3.

[953] The construction of sentences in Cortés, Cartas, 152, and the complex
relationship, have misled nearly every one who notices this incident—as, Gomara,
Hist. Mex., 171; Vetancvrt, Teatro Mex., pt. iii. 147; Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., .
[954] Alonso Coltzin. Chimalpain, Hist. Conq., ii. 12. Ixtlilxochitl calls him
Ahuecatzin. Hist. Chich., 305. Alvarado stood sponsor. Terrified by some idle
gossip, or by the preparations for his baptism, the boy asked the friar when he was
to be sacrificed; but received comfort in a pious exhortation. Torquemada, i. 520.

[955] Herrera gives the command to Olid and Juan Rodriguez de Villafuerte, the
owner of the much disputed first madonna image, accompanied by Juan Nuñez,
Sedeño, Lagos, and Mata. dec. ii. lib. x. cap. xvii. Olid may have been detached
from Quauhquechollan after the first success had made troops less necessary; yet
Herrera indicates that he set out before this expedition.

[956] ‘En lo de Cachula fue adonde auian muerto en los aposentos quinze
Españoles.’ Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 112.

[957] B. V. de Tapia, in his testimony against Cortés, states that about 6000
prisoners were sent to him from these districts by Olid, all of whom had
surrendered without resistance, and that he ordered the men, 2000 in number, to
be executed, the women and children being sold or distributed. Cortés,
Residencia, i. 59-60.

[958] ‘Boluierõ a Tepeaca, y auiendo estado treynta dias en esta jornada hallaron
a Hernando Cortes, que era buelto de Guacachula.’ Herrera, dec. ii. lib. x. cap.
xvii. These successes are said to have been dimmed by a severe defeat at
Tochtepec, on Rio Papaloapan, whither Salcedo had been sent with 80 men. It
was the entrepôt for trade in this region, and was held by a strong Aztec garrison,
aided by native warriors with Chinantec pikes. Owing partly to the efficient use of
this weapon, and partly to the carelessness of Salcedo, the troops were surprised
and slaughtered to a man, after selling their lives as dearly as possible. The
disaster being a blow also to Spanish prestige which it would never do to overlook,
Ordaz and Ávila were sent not long after with a larger force, some horses, and
20,000 allies, to exact retaliation in death, captivity, and rich spoil. The victors
came back with ample plunder. Herrera, ubi sup. See note 4 this chapter for
doubts on the massacre.
 CHAPTER XXIX.
KING-MAKING AND CONVERTING.

October-December, 1520.

Conquest in Detail—Barba Caught—Other Arrivals and Reinforcements

—The Small-pox Comes to the Assistance of the Spaniards—Letters to
the Emperor—Establishing of Segura de la Frontera—Certain of the
Disaffected Withdraw from the Army and Return to Cuba—Division of
Spoils—Head-quarters Established at Tlascala.

Thus all was going gayly with the Estremaduran once more. It
was easy work overcoming the divided Aztec forces, which
combined had proved so formidable. And there was little trouble now
from factions. None advocated a station by the sea-side, with ships
ready for flight; none thought of abandoning New Spain for Cuba.
The simple presence of the general was as the shield of Abas, which
performed so many marvels, and the mere sight of which could on
the instant stay a revolt or reduce a province to submission.
The successes of the Spaniards were rapidly enlarging the fame
and influence of their leader, bringing among other fruits, as we have
seen, alliances and reinforcements, not alone from native sources,
but from Spanish. The first accession of the latter was thirteen
soldiers and two horses, brought in a small vessel under the hidalgo,
Pedro Barba, formerly commandant at Habana. Commandant
Rangel at Villa Rica had received instructions to secure any vessel
that might arrive, both with a view to obtain recruits, and to prevent
news from travelling to Cuba of the defeat of Narvaez, or other
incidents. As the vessel entered the roadstead he accordingly
approached it in a well manned boat, with hidden arms. “How fares
Narvaez?” was Barba’s first inquiry. “Exceedingly well,” replied
Rangel. “He is prosperous and rich, while Cortés is a fugitive, with a
score of miserable followers at the most; or he even may be dead.”
“All the better,” rejoined Barba; “for I bear letters from the most
magnificent Velazquez, with instructions to secure the traitor, if he be
alive, and send him at once to Cuba, whence he shall go to Spain,
as commanded by our most illustrious Bishop Fonseca.” As a matter
of course, Señor Barba will accept the proffered hospitality; he will
go ashore and deliver his message to Narvaez in person. And he will
catch this slippery fox from Estremadura, and carry him hence to be
hanged; he will carry him to his worshipful master Velazquez to be
hanged. So entering the boat he is conveyed away, but only, alas! to
be declared a prisoner; only, alas! to learn that though damned,
Cortés is not dead, and is by no means likely at once to meet
strangulation at the hand either of Barba, Narvaez, or Velazquez.
Meanwhile other visitors in other boats proceed to secure the crew.
The vessel is dismantled; and since Cortés is the king, and not
Narvaez, the so lately fierce and loyal Barba, nothing loath, declares
for Cortés. Indeed, Barba was by no means unfriendly to the
general, as proven by his attitude at Habana two years before. Any
such reinforcement was gladly welcomed at Tepeaca, and Cortés
sought to insure Barba’s loyalty by making him captain of archers.
[959] A week later arrived another small vessel, under the hidalgo
Rodrigo Morejon de Lobera, with eight soldiers, a mare, a quantity of
crossbow material, and a cargo of provisions. It was secured in the
same manner, and the soldiers and sailors proceeded to join the
army. Thus Cortés draws them in, friend and foe alike being his fish,
if once they enter his net.
 More substantial reinforcements were in store, however.
Governor Garay, of Jamaica, had in no manner been discouraged by
the failure of his last expedition to Pánuco, and the rumors of his
rival’s success in New Spain fired him to renewed efforts, the more
so since he possessed the royal grant, the vessels, and the men,
with ample means to sustain them. In the spring of 1520 he had
despatched three vessels, with about one hundred and fifty soldiers
and sailors, a few horses, and some artillery, under the former
commander, Pineda.[960] Ascending the Pánuco the expedition
came to a town,[961] and met with good reception, but the natives
soon tired of giving their substance to strangers, who may beside
have been guilty of excesses, and they made hostile
demonstrations. Pineda showed a bold front, and proceeded to
attack the town, but was surprised and killed, together with a number
of soldiers and the horses.[962] The rest escaped as best they could
in two of the vessels, pursued by a fleet of canoes. One of the
caravels was wrecked not far above Villa Rica, whereupon a portion
of the men resolved to proceed by land rather than suffer starvation
on board, for in the hurry of the flight the lockers had received no
attention. Both the sea and land parties arrived at the Spanish port,
where every care was given them.[963] Thence they were forwarded
to Tepeaca, where their cadaverous complexion and swollen bodies
procured for them the nickname of ‘panzaverdetes,’ or green
paunches. Hardship and bad food had carried a number past relief,
and even in Tepeaca several died, including Camargo, as Bernal
Diaz believes.
A month later, after the Quauhquechollan expedition, another
vessel arrived with about fifty soldiers,[964] under Miguel Diaz de
Auz, an Aragonian cavalier. He had been sent to reinforce Pineda,
but after remaining at Rio Pánuco for a month, without seeing even a
native, he had come down to search for the fleet. The fame of Cortés